Some authorizers report that they operate in
a climate of political vulnerability. In Chicago,
New York, and Indianapolis, for example, the
effort to open quality new schools is driven by
high-level political leaders. Chicago's mayor,
the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, and the
chancellor of the NYC Public Schools all have
tied their political fortunes to their respective
new schools initiatives through frequent media
appearances and public efforts to personally recruit
high-quality organizations to open schools.
In Indianapolis, the mayor has launched the
charter schools effort from his own office, thereby taking full responsibility for the schools
and their results. If any of these elected officials loses a future election or—in the case of
the CEO and chancellor—is replaced, there is
a danger that the charter school reform effort
could collapse under new leadership.

In a very direct way, the political vulnerability
that these offices operate under acts as a powerful
incentive. Staff members cannot afford complacency—
they need to recruit and approve
strong schools that get measurable results—and
they need to promote their successes widely
to gain public support for their work. To varying
degrees, this pressure also encourages staff
members to institutionalize their processes as
much as possible so they are less vulnerable
to future leadership change. The authorizing
staff in Indianapolis, for example, has worked
hard to publicize its schools' successes so that
the charter school initiative has strong public
support no matter who the next mayor is, and
regardless of how committed to charter schools
he or she might be. They also have developed
a series of handbooks outlining how to implement
various processes to ensure continuity for
the schools.

According to these authorizers, political pressure
is desirable to the extent that it motivates
them to improve their practices. It is also desirable
to the extent that it reflects the wishes of
the broader public. But research and experience
suggest that the most common barriers to meritbased
authorizing decisions are political—such
as those arising from influential community
groups that have a weak charter application but
think they have a good idea, or from administrators
who do not want to upset parents by
closing a school, or from parents who want to keep "their" school open, regardless of its performance.
Even if these particular authorizers
have not fallen prey to such problems, policymakers
should consider ways to minimize
the power that their specialized influences can
exert if they destabilize authorizers' policies
and threaten their ability to make merit-based
decisions. Policymakers also should consider
the amount of time and money these offices
spend building public and political support
for their initiatives. According to these authorizers,
when staff members have to spend an
inordinate amount of time responding to the
concerns of special interest groups, it compromises
their own internal practices.

Authorizers that operate transparently—sharing
both their decisions and their processes with the
public—may be more insulated from these types
of pressures. It is difficult for opponents to argue
against hard evidence of a school's success
or failure, for example. Specialized committees,
such as California's Advisory Commission on
Charter Schools, that make recommendations to
the final decision-maker also give the public a
voice while helping to ensure that an authorizing
office and its successful charter schools are
less vulnerable to political change.

In addition to protecting individual authorizers
from disruptive politics, policymakers also can
insulate the state's overall system of authorizing.
By empowering a diverse set of authorizers
with different kinds of political and institutional
bases, several of the states where the authorizers
profiled in this guide are located have established
systems in which high-quality authorizing
is likely to endure even if political change
affects the work of one particular authorizer.